Collocational Competence in English Language Teaching: An Overview

Abstract

Despite its prime importance for language proficiency, collocational competence is one of the most neglected areas in vocabulary studies and second language teaching/learning. This negligence is the underlying motive for writing the present paper. Hence, the paper aims at raising awareness of the importance of this significant dimension of vocabulary knowledge and presenting a well-rounded view of this lexical phenomenon. To this end, the paper gives a brief introduction to the topic, and offers an overview of relevant definitions and classifications. This is followed by a summary of the importance of teaching/learning collocations, and a list of relevant lines of research in collocation studies. The last part presents a number of recommended activities that English language instructors can implement in their classroom. The paper is thus helpful to both researchers and language instructors as it sheds the light on pertinent areas for research and recommends useful activities for teaching collocations. Introduction For long decades, the focus in second language (L2) acquisition and language teaching studies was placed on the study of grammar and, to a much lesser extent, pronunciation neglecting the importance of vocabulary learning. This was due to a sweeping misconception that vocabulary acquisition could take care of itself (Decarrico, 2001). More recently, however, and especially starting the 1970s and 1980s, many voices highlighted the importance of vocabulary acquisition/learning (e.g., Wilkins, 1972) and cast doubt on the " natural " acquisition of vocabulary by L2 learners. A number of studies also proved that vocabulary plays a significant role in language proficiency, such as reading comprehension (Beck et al., 1987) and writing production (Laufer, 1994; Read, 2002), and that poor vocabulary proficiency is a common cause for incompetent communication (Chastain, 1988). These voices and findings led to a revival of interest in vocabulary acquisition/learning and urged a number of researchers and practitioners to pay more attention to vocabulary studies. Word knowledge is of special significance to vocabulary acquisition/ learning. According to Nation (2001), word knowledge involves knowledge of word form, word meaning and word use. The aspect of word form refers to the spoken and written forms of words as well as their morphological composition. As for the aspect of word meaning, it entails knowledge of a number of constituents, including reference, sense, connotative meaning and sense relations. The last aspect, word use, refers to knowing the grammatical, lexical and stylistic constraints on the use of words in the linguistic context. Among the three aspects of word knowledge, the last aspect received the least attention despite its significance to accurate language use. The present paper falls under studies of word use, and more specifically the lexical constraints on using words in context. The paper focuses on the lexical combinations of words or, in other words, word collocates. With the aim of raising awareness to the importance of this language phenomenon, widely known as collocation, encouraging more research in the area and urging language instructors to give it due attention, the paper reviews some pertinent definitions/categories, highlights the significance of collocations, summarizes the main relevant lines of research and suggests a variety of classroom activities to teach collocations.